Ebookad.com is a useful source of ebooks on all sorts of subjects, and it also provides links to various news items about the ebook world. One such link recently was to a piece on the BBC news site about copyright and the 'copyfight'.
Those of you who depend on copyright for your living, or part of it, need to be aware of what is going on in this area. The BBC article won't provide any definitive answers, but it does provide further food for thought on an extremely complicated issue. Getting to grips with copyright law in your home nation is difficult enough, but throw in the complications of international variations and headaches will ensue.
My own position, for better or for worse, is to produce the work and not fuss too much about whether anyone is going to rip it off. Frankly, I am not likely to produce something that is going to make a fortune for anyone, so maintaining a grip of steel on my copyright is beside the point.
In fact, in relation to my latest essay, On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, I am making it available free. The section of the essay which is headed Notes to Readers makes it clear that you can do pretty much what you like with it -- short of passing it off as your own work.
In other words, you can print the essay out to read it, you can photocopy it for distribution to your students (if that applies), you can email the PDF to a friend, and so forth. If you are smart enough to figure out how to make any money out of the damn thing, please let me know, because I would like to know too. Other than that, feel free.
Monday, February 21, 2005
Friday, February 18, 2005
When is a fact not a fact?
Hugh Hewitt, about whom I shall have a lot to say next week, complains bitterly about the ‘bias’ of what he calls the mainstream media in America. Well, Hugh, the problem in the UK is not so much bias as excessive credulity; either that or an alarming lack of interest in verifying the facts.
Take for instance, the case of 13-year-old Emma Maree Urquhart. In my post of 7 February (see archives), I related how Emma has written a novel, Dragon Tamers, which has, allegedly, set the world on fire and is selling in vast numbers. I expressed some dismay that the Times, in which I had read this story, had done nothing more than reprint the publisher’s press release without, apparently, asking a single relevant question.
Today the Independent does more of the same. (Thanks to booktrade.info for the link.)
There is an article in the Indie about young Emma’s Dragon Tamers which is written by the paper’s Scotland correspondent; and he seems to be an unusually trusting sort of chap.
The headline is ‘Schoolgirl’s tale about dragons becomes hot stuff in Hollywood.’ But when we read on, what do we find? We find that this article is based entirely on hot air.
Emma Maree, we are told, is ‘mulling over the possibility of a Hollywood movie deal.’ But we are not told that this is something that every writer does, usually three times a day, after meals.
The book’s publisher, Charles Faulkner, head of Aultbea Publishing, said that ‘discussions were well under way for the book to be turned into a Hollywood film after interest was expressed from several major studios.’ But we aren’t given any details.
There is a lot more in the same vein: apparently there are discussions about a television series, an audio book, a game, and translating the story into ‘almost every major language of the world.’
Well now, look – I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun. And I certainly don’t want to damage the emerging career of a 13-year-old. But surely it must be obvious to even the dimmest young journalist that this is the purest flim-flam. There is not an independently verified fact or name or figure anywhere in sight. So either the Independent is employing someone who is remarkably naive, or else they are printing the story knowing full well that it’s all bull. Which is it?
One thing we can say for certain. This guy Faulkner writes one hell of a press release. And when he talks to reporters they just seem to sit there in a trance, writing it all down. I wonder what he puts in their whisky.
Take for instance, the case of 13-year-old Emma Maree Urquhart. In my post of 7 February (see archives), I related how Emma has written a novel, Dragon Tamers, which has, allegedly, set the world on fire and is selling in vast numbers. I expressed some dismay that the Times, in which I had read this story, had done nothing more than reprint the publisher’s press release without, apparently, asking a single relevant question.
Today the Independent does more of the same. (Thanks to booktrade.info for the link.)
There is an article in the Indie about young Emma’s Dragon Tamers which is written by the paper’s Scotland correspondent; and he seems to be an unusually trusting sort of chap.
The headline is ‘Schoolgirl’s tale about dragons becomes hot stuff in Hollywood.’ But when we read on, what do we find? We find that this article is based entirely on hot air.
Emma Maree, we are told, is ‘mulling over the possibility of a Hollywood movie deal.’ But we are not told that this is something that every writer does, usually three times a day, after meals.
The book’s publisher, Charles Faulkner, head of Aultbea Publishing, said that ‘discussions were well under way for the book to be turned into a Hollywood film after interest was expressed from several major studios.’ But we aren’t given any details.
There is a lot more in the same vein: apparently there are discussions about a television series, an audio book, a game, and translating the story into ‘almost every major language of the world.’
Well now, look – I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun. And I certainly don’t want to damage the emerging career of a 13-year-old. But surely it must be obvious to even the dimmest young journalist that this is the purest flim-flam. There is not an independently verified fact or name or figure anywhere in sight. So either the Independent is employing someone who is remarkably naive, or else they are printing the story knowing full well that it’s all bull. Which is it?
One thing we can say for certain. This guy Faulkner writes one hell of a press release. And when he talks to reporters they just seem to sit there in a trance, writing it all down. I wonder what he puts in their whisky.
Two down, 33 to go
I have just read another Booker prize-winner, which together with Possession makes two; so I only have to read another 33 and I shall have read the complete set; I shall then be able to regard myself as an expert on literary fiction; either that or I shall have become completely deranged, I’m not sure which.
Actually, now that I come to look at the list of prize-winners, I realise that I have read one other Booker winner. But it was such a second-rate piece of work, and induced such an amazing sense of tedium, that I am not even going to mention its name. Instead I will talk about Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.
I read Life of Pi not because it is famous but because it was recommended to me by a dentist, a lady without an ounce of intellectual pretension in her body. She said it was ‘a perfectly delightful story’, so I decided that it must at least be worth a look.
Well, now I've read it, and I suppose my friend is right. The book is very much worth a look. But what I found difficult – indeed impossible – while reading it, was to separate my reaction as a reader from my knowledge that the thing was a prize-winner; and that it was therefore something special.
Just in case you don’t know, I think I ought to begin by pointing out that Life of Pi won the Booker in more than usually bizarre circumstances. Yann Martel had written a couple of other books, which were published in the UK by Faber. But the early books had not sold well and Faber had no faith that this one would do any better, so they turned it down.
Pi was also rejected by at least five other big publishers, and was eventually taken on by the small firm of Canongate.
Now, consider this: if the eventual publisher, Canongate, had not taken the book, it is likely that the manuscript would have remained for ever in the author’s filing cabinet. Furthermore, if the book had been accepted by one of the bigger firms, it would not even have been entered for the Booker Prize in the first place, because publishers are only allowed to make two nominations and the big firms have to enter their most famous authors; if they don’t, the famous authors are likely to go elsewhere.
The Life of Pi saga thus provides a beautifully clear demonstration of something that I have written about at length in my recent essay, On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, namely the random way in which success is achieved (or not) in publishing. (Click here for a free download of my essay in PDF format.) Pi is a book which was turned down for publication by numerous ‘good judges’. It was entered for the Booker Prize by a small firm which had no stronger candidates. And it so happened that the particular set of judges who were reading in 2002 happened to like it best. Or a majority of them did. Such are the rolls of the dice.
Do you begin to see how difficult it is for a reader who knows all that to judge the book, in 2005, in isolation? It’s impossible. You can’t put all that background out of your mind. As you read you are inevitably saying to yourself, If I had read this when it was just a pile of paper, would I (a) have wanted to publish it, and (b) would I have ever dreamed that it would go on to be a huge success?
The answer to both these questions is probably No. If I pretend for a moment that when Pi was being shopped around I was the chief editor at that well known bastion of literature, Clapham & Irons, I have to say that I would probably have sent the ms back to its agent with a polite note. Interesting, I would have said, but not for me. I certainly would not have seen it as likely to sell 1.8 million copies, which it is reported to have done.
So now let’s have a look at the book itself.
It begins with an Author’s Note. This is, I think, part of the fiction. But some bits of it may be true. Yann Martel tells us that he went to India to write a novel, a book which didn’t work out, but he had a bit of money left so he went to the town of Pondicherry, and there he found an elderly man who told him the rudiments of the story which Martel later made into Life of Pi. The main character in this story was a sixteen-year-old boy whose name is Pi. Later, in Toronto, the author managed to locate Pi, now a grown man, and talked to him at great length. The novel tells the story of Pi’s life, before and after a shipwreck.
Now it’s the shipwreck bit that had put me off, until the lady dentist told me not to be so silly. What I had heard was that the book was about a boy who was shipwrecked and found himself in a boat with a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger. And that really didn’t sound like a novel I wanted to read. It reminded me too much of Edward Lear: ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat’; all that sort of thing.
Anyway, after the author’s note we get into the story proper, which is now told by Pi himself in the first person.
To begin with, the writing is quite pleasing. But already, by page 11, I made a note that my attention was beginning to wander. A bit. For my taste there was too much family history (what some people call backstory) being passed on in lumps -- not easily digestible. But I persevered. I think I would have done so anyway, even if I’d been reading it as a pile of paper.
Part One of the book, which is really all background, lasts until page 97. And then, with the words ‘The ship sank’, we begin to get somewhere. Part Two, which lasts until page 289, tells us what Pi got up to in the lifeboat. Or what he says he got up to; together with the hyena and the rest of them. The tiger’s name, by the way, is Richard Parker. If you want to know why, read the book.
Part Three is a little coda, in which Pi is debriefed about his experiences by a couple of Japanese chappies who are anxious to find out what made the ship sink.
Once things got going, I had no trouble in remaining interested in this book. I don’t know that I would second my friend the dentist in saying that it is ‘perfectly delightful’, but it’s certainly interesting, and thoroughly well written. It apparently took Martel four years to complete, and I don’t know where he was at the time, but it reads as if it was written by someone who was not in a hurry. It reads as if the author was sitting in some Indian village, a long way from a telephone or a satellite dish, and quietly got on with his work when he wasn’t having a zizz. This is not, on the whole, a bad impression for a writer to make on a reader.
Life of Pi, as we have seen, might all too easily have ended its days in the author’s filing cabinet, without ever having been set in type. But once it was published, and particularly after it won the Booker, it proved to be a book which generated genuine word of mouth. The Booker alone will sell you perhaps 100,000 copies. But to get above that you have to enjoy the benefit of unforced enthusiasm. And that Life of Pi was able to do. Would that we were all smart enough to emulate that.
Should you wish to know more, you can find an informative interview with the author here. Of course, if you care about whether Richard Parker, the tiger, is actually a Christ figure, and all of that literary symbol and metaphor crap, you will have to do your own research, because I’m not remotely interested. And neither, I can assure you, is the dentist.
Actually, now that I come to look at the list of prize-winners, I realise that I have read one other Booker winner. But it was such a second-rate piece of work, and induced such an amazing sense of tedium, that I am not even going to mention its name. Instead I will talk about Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.
I read Life of Pi not because it is famous but because it was recommended to me by a dentist, a lady without an ounce of intellectual pretension in her body. She said it was ‘a perfectly delightful story’, so I decided that it must at least be worth a look.
Well, now I've read it, and I suppose my friend is right. The book is very much worth a look. But what I found difficult – indeed impossible – while reading it, was to separate my reaction as a reader from my knowledge that the thing was a prize-winner; and that it was therefore something special.
Just in case you don’t know, I think I ought to begin by pointing out that Life of Pi won the Booker in more than usually bizarre circumstances. Yann Martel had written a couple of other books, which were published in the UK by Faber. But the early books had not sold well and Faber had no faith that this one would do any better, so they turned it down.
Pi was also rejected by at least five other big publishers, and was eventually taken on by the small firm of Canongate.
Now, consider this: if the eventual publisher, Canongate, had not taken the book, it is likely that the manuscript would have remained for ever in the author’s filing cabinet. Furthermore, if the book had been accepted by one of the bigger firms, it would not even have been entered for the Booker Prize in the first place, because publishers are only allowed to make two nominations and the big firms have to enter their most famous authors; if they don’t, the famous authors are likely to go elsewhere.
The Life of Pi saga thus provides a beautifully clear demonstration of something that I have written about at length in my recent essay, On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, namely the random way in which success is achieved (or not) in publishing. (Click here for a free download of my essay in PDF format.) Pi is a book which was turned down for publication by numerous ‘good judges’. It was entered for the Booker Prize by a small firm which had no stronger candidates. And it so happened that the particular set of judges who were reading in 2002 happened to like it best. Or a majority of them did. Such are the rolls of the dice.
Do you begin to see how difficult it is for a reader who knows all that to judge the book, in 2005, in isolation? It’s impossible. You can’t put all that background out of your mind. As you read you are inevitably saying to yourself, If I had read this when it was just a pile of paper, would I (a) have wanted to publish it, and (b) would I have ever dreamed that it would go on to be a huge success?
The answer to both these questions is probably No. If I pretend for a moment that when Pi was being shopped around I was the chief editor at that well known bastion of literature, Clapham & Irons, I have to say that I would probably have sent the ms back to its agent with a polite note. Interesting, I would have said, but not for me. I certainly would not have seen it as likely to sell 1.8 million copies, which it is reported to have done.
So now let’s have a look at the book itself.
It begins with an Author’s Note. This is, I think, part of the fiction. But some bits of it may be true. Yann Martel tells us that he went to India to write a novel, a book which didn’t work out, but he had a bit of money left so he went to the town of Pondicherry, and there he found an elderly man who told him the rudiments of the story which Martel later made into Life of Pi. The main character in this story was a sixteen-year-old boy whose name is Pi. Later, in Toronto, the author managed to locate Pi, now a grown man, and talked to him at great length. The novel tells the story of Pi’s life, before and after a shipwreck.
Now it’s the shipwreck bit that had put me off, until the lady dentist told me not to be so silly. What I had heard was that the book was about a boy who was shipwrecked and found himself in a boat with a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger. And that really didn’t sound like a novel I wanted to read. It reminded me too much of Edward Lear: ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat’; all that sort of thing.
Anyway, after the author’s note we get into the story proper, which is now told by Pi himself in the first person.
To begin with, the writing is quite pleasing. But already, by page 11, I made a note that my attention was beginning to wander. A bit. For my taste there was too much family history (what some people call backstory) being passed on in lumps -- not easily digestible. But I persevered. I think I would have done so anyway, even if I’d been reading it as a pile of paper.
Part One of the book, which is really all background, lasts until page 97. And then, with the words ‘The ship sank’, we begin to get somewhere. Part Two, which lasts until page 289, tells us what Pi got up to in the lifeboat. Or what he says he got up to; together with the hyena and the rest of them. The tiger’s name, by the way, is Richard Parker. If you want to know why, read the book.
Part Three is a little coda, in which Pi is debriefed about his experiences by a couple of Japanese chappies who are anxious to find out what made the ship sink.
Once things got going, I had no trouble in remaining interested in this book. I don’t know that I would second my friend the dentist in saying that it is ‘perfectly delightful’, but it’s certainly interesting, and thoroughly well written. It apparently took Martel four years to complete, and I don’t know where he was at the time, but it reads as if it was written by someone who was not in a hurry. It reads as if the author was sitting in some Indian village, a long way from a telephone or a satellite dish, and quietly got on with his work when he wasn’t having a zizz. This is not, on the whole, a bad impression for a writer to make on a reader.
Life of Pi, as we have seen, might all too easily have ended its days in the author’s filing cabinet, without ever having been set in type. But once it was published, and particularly after it won the Booker, it proved to be a book which generated genuine word of mouth. The Booker alone will sell you perhaps 100,000 copies. But to get above that you have to enjoy the benefit of unforced enthusiasm. And that Life of Pi was able to do. Would that we were all smart enough to emulate that.
Should you wish to know more, you can find an informative interview with the author here. Of course, if you care about whether Richard Parker, the tiger, is actually a Christ figure, and all of that literary symbol and metaphor crap, you will have to do your own research, because I’m not remotely interested. And neither, I can assure you, is the dentist.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Value for money
The Times today carries an article about whether MBA courses provide value for money. Acquiring an MBA degree obviously which involves a year or more of your time, plus fees, and living expenses, and not a little effort. That being the case, how long is it before your enhanced earning power covers the cost of your course and begins to show a profit?
The research has been undertaken by an outfit called TopMBA, and the results are based, naturally, on various assumptions. In principle, however, the research suggests that for a US two-year degree a typical payback period would be just over three and a half years; for a one-year European MBA the period is two to three years. Thereafter, the additional earnings resulting from your MBA are pure gravy.
This prompts me to ask the following question: has anyone done any similar work on the monetary value of a degree in creative writing?
If I had to guess, I would imagine that the result is negative. In other words, I doubt whether, on average, the typical creative-writing graduate, with an MFA or whatever, is ever going to earn enough from writing to cover the substantial cost of the degree, let alone wallow in the gravy.
But I may, as usual, be hopelessly cynical and ill-informed on this point. Given all the weird things that people do research into, perhaps someone has produced data on this.
By the way, you may from time to time see advertisements from 'colleges' and other institutions which offer to teach you to write short stories, articles or novels through a correspondence course. And these adverts absolutely GUARANTEE -- yes, folks, they one hundred per cent infallibly guarantee -- that if you don't earn the full cost of the fees by the time you have completed the course (earn it, that is, from writing stuff for the press, under their guidance), they will refund your money.
I believe every word of that. Do you know why? Because the catch is in the phrase 'complete the course'. Barely one person in a hundred ever does finish the course. The world is full of dreamers, many of whom sign up. And they are then set assignments. Which, after an initial flurry of enthusiasm, they never complete. So these trainee writers never qualify for a possible refund.
Mind you, we all know that, even if the hopefuls actually did write 20 articles, or short stories, or half a novel, the chances of getting their work published in a paid-for context are slim indeed.
Later Note, 9 March 2013: If by any chance you were led here by Google or similar, you may like to know that there is now a web site which provides useful info on Masters degrees in Business Administration, and other subjects. Here's the link.
The research has been undertaken by an outfit called TopMBA, and the results are based, naturally, on various assumptions. In principle, however, the research suggests that for a US two-year degree a typical payback period would be just over three and a half years; for a one-year European MBA the period is two to three years. Thereafter, the additional earnings resulting from your MBA are pure gravy.
This prompts me to ask the following question: has anyone done any similar work on the monetary value of a degree in creative writing?
If I had to guess, I would imagine that the result is negative. In other words, I doubt whether, on average, the typical creative-writing graduate, with an MFA or whatever, is ever going to earn enough from writing to cover the substantial cost of the degree, let alone wallow in the gravy.
But I may, as usual, be hopelessly cynical and ill-informed on this point. Given all the weird things that people do research into, perhaps someone has produced data on this.
By the way, you may from time to time see advertisements from 'colleges' and other institutions which offer to teach you to write short stories, articles or novels through a correspondence course. And these adverts absolutely GUARANTEE -- yes, folks, they one hundred per cent infallibly guarantee -- that if you don't earn the full cost of the fees by the time you have completed the course (earn it, that is, from writing stuff for the press, under their guidance), they will refund your money.
I believe every word of that. Do you know why? Because the catch is in the phrase 'complete the course'. Barely one person in a hundred ever does finish the course. The world is full of dreamers, many of whom sign up. And they are then set assignments. Which, after an initial flurry of enthusiasm, they never complete. So these trainee writers never qualify for a possible refund.
Mind you, we all know that, even if the hopefuls actually did write 20 articles, or short stories, or half a novel, the chances of getting their work published in a paid-for context are slim indeed.
Later Note, 9 March 2013: If by any chance you were led here by Google or similar, you may like to know that there is now a web site which provides useful info on Masters degrees in Business Administration, and other subjects. Here's the link.
Gerard rides again
If you haven't yet come across the amazing Gerard Jones then you really must be introduced. As a matter of fact, if you already have visited Gerard's site you should still go take another look, because he's done things to it.
A few years ago, Gerard set up a web site called Everyone Who's Anyone. To begin with, this featured publishers and agents to whom he had sent the ms of his book Ginny Good, a ms which, to a man, and woman, they firmly rejected. Gerard not unnaturally took a dim view of this (don't we all?) and he published their names and addresses, telephone numbers, and probably, in some cases, size of shoe. Some of these people had previously done their best to keep these contact details out of the public eye because they really didn't want to be bothered with people like you, me, and Gerard.
What was much more fun was that Gerard also printed the full text of the rejection letters that people sent him -- letters which, like many of those written in haste, often included some ill-advised statements that made the sender look foolish. So various rather pompous agents and editors (or possibly their 'interns') wrote in and asked Gerard not to publish their first letter; whereupon he published the second letter, and made them look even bigger prats than before.
In the course of time, however, I dare say a few lawyers' letters were sent, and Gerard's site gradually softened into a more orthodox list of about 2,500 agents, editors and publishers in the US, UK, and Canada; and, as such, it was undoubtedly useful to all sorts of people.
Now he has sent out a general email telling those of us who are listed, in one capacity or another, that he has already updated the site to include about 4,000 talent agents, independent movie producers and movie-studio executives. He has changed the site title to reflect this: it is now Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing and Tinseltown Too; it is up to its fourth edition.
In the course of time, Gerard Jones's book Ginny Good actually did find a publisher, albeit a new and small one: Monkfish books. What is more, the book has generated some genuinely warm and enthusiastic reviews.
Gerard spent something like eighteen years in writing and rewriting Ginny Good, and then sending it out. It is said that his rejection slips/letters total in the low thousands, and I can believe it because he has that sort of manic energy. Of course, it would be a mistake to assume, from this evidence, that if you just persevere long enough you are bound to get into print eventually; you might end up by getting nowhere. But by golly you have to admire someone who keeps at it that long.
In his latest email, Gerard kindly includes a copy of the letter that he has been sending to movie producers. This, as you would expect, is just as much fun as everything else. He is clearly a believer in the dictum that modesty is the enemy of talent. Ginny Good, he says, turned out to be 'the best book published anywhere in the world so far this century.' He is not, he says, 'gonna try to hype the book. You'll either read it and go gaga over it like anyone with any brains does and want to make a movie out of it or you won't.' It is also, he adds, 'one of the coolest, most significant, funniest, smartest, most honest, heartbreaking, edifying, illuminating books in all American literature going clear back to whenever whoever came over on the Mayflower landed wherever they landed.'
Gerard, I love you. Keep on doing it, man.
A few years ago, Gerard set up a web site called Everyone Who's Anyone. To begin with, this featured publishers and agents to whom he had sent the ms of his book Ginny Good, a ms which, to a man, and woman, they firmly rejected. Gerard not unnaturally took a dim view of this (don't we all?) and he published their names and addresses, telephone numbers, and probably, in some cases, size of shoe. Some of these people had previously done their best to keep these contact details out of the public eye because they really didn't want to be bothered with people like you, me, and Gerard.
What was much more fun was that Gerard also printed the full text of the rejection letters that people sent him -- letters which, like many of those written in haste, often included some ill-advised statements that made the sender look foolish. So various rather pompous agents and editors (or possibly their 'interns') wrote in and asked Gerard not to publish their first letter; whereupon he published the second letter, and made them look even bigger prats than before.
In the course of time, however, I dare say a few lawyers' letters were sent, and Gerard's site gradually softened into a more orthodox list of about 2,500 agents, editors and publishers in the US, UK, and Canada; and, as such, it was undoubtedly useful to all sorts of people.
Now he has sent out a general email telling those of us who are listed, in one capacity or another, that he has already updated the site to include about 4,000 talent agents, independent movie producers and movie-studio executives. He has changed the site title to reflect this: it is now Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing and Tinseltown Too; it is up to its fourth edition.
In the course of time, Gerard Jones's book Ginny Good actually did find a publisher, albeit a new and small one: Monkfish books. What is more, the book has generated some genuinely warm and enthusiastic reviews.
Gerard spent something like eighteen years in writing and rewriting Ginny Good, and then sending it out. It is said that his rejection slips/letters total in the low thousands, and I can believe it because he has that sort of manic energy. Of course, it would be a mistake to assume, from this evidence, that if you just persevere long enough you are bound to get into print eventually; you might end up by getting nowhere. But by golly you have to admire someone who keeps at it that long.
In his latest email, Gerard kindly includes a copy of the letter that he has been sending to movie producers. This, as you would expect, is just as much fun as everything else. He is clearly a believer in the dictum that modesty is the enemy of talent. Ginny Good, he says, turned out to be 'the best book published anywhere in the world so far this century.' He is not, he says, 'gonna try to hype the book. You'll either read it and go gaga over it like anyone with any brains does and want to make a movie out of it or you won't.' It is also, he adds, 'one of the coolest, most significant, funniest, smartest, most honest, heartbreaking, edifying, illuminating books in all American literature going clear back to whenever whoever came over on the Mayflower landed wherever they landed.'
Gerard, I love you. Keep on doing it, man.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Kate Atkinson: Case Histories
I wonder if any of you fancy Kate Atkinson. I speak in a literary sense, of course.
Kate first appeared on the scene in 1995, with her novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, published in the UK by Transworld. This won the Whitbread award for the best first novel of the year. The award meant that the book was then shortlisted for the title of overall Whitbread Book of the Year (compared with biography, et cetera), and it won that award too.
So far so good. A success story. Except that when I read Behind I couldn't see much in it. I now realise, of course, being definitely older and perhaps wiser, that Kate was simply the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of randomness, aka chance. It so happened that the goddess Fortuna smiled upon her. Kate's book was a perfectly competent piece of work, but it wasn't, in any absolute sense, a 'better' book than 150 others that were published that year. It just happened to be the one that the Whitbread judges liked best. With a different set of judges, some other book would have won, and Kate Atkinson would not have become a superstar; she would have been just another writer, not eligible for the full treatment of big publicity budget, author's tour, press interviews, the whole bag of tricks. In all probability she would have been dumped after two or three books which didn't sell very well.
In publishing, however, remarkable things happen to books that win prizes. A winner-take-all mechanism kicks in, and books which are not, in reality, any 'better' or more 'brilliant' than many others somehow acquire a reputation and a sparkle which colours everyone's view; technically, this is called survivorshp bias. (For more details of the winner-take-all mechanism and survivorship bias you will just have to read my latest extended essay, On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile; this was described at nauseating, self-satisfied length in my post of last Friday.)
So in 1995 our Kate became famous. She then went on to write a couple more books, Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (1999), and now she has published Case Histories, which I have just read. First I'll tell you what I thought of it, and then we'll have a look at a few other opinions.
As for me, well I found Case Histories to be hard going. For one thing you have to go 60 pages before you get anything that might reasonably be called a scene (in dramatic terms) in which two or more actors engage in a dialogue. And to my mind that ain't the best way to proceed. So I began to skip. Fast. Which is not, of course, the ideal way to read a novel. You should read every word, but I'm afraid I am very old-fashioned about these things and I expect the writer to give me some help. Reading a novel is suppose to be fun, at least in my estimation; it's supposed to be an enjoyable, interesting, satisfying experience; it's not supposed to be a whole lot of hard, tedious work.
Anyway, I did stick with the book, after a fashion, and after a couple of hundred pages or so I began to see a little more virtue in it. And by the end I could also see, very clearly, that if the material had been organised differently, Case Histories could have been an impressive novel indeed. But it would have been an impressive crime novel. And that, I suspect, is something that Kate Atkinson and her publisher would rather die than admit.
It has long been noted in these columns, and in places like Ansible, that those who choose to write and publish what they consider to be literary fiction would rather be burnt at the stake than admit that they have anything in common with sordid and inferior genres such as science fiction, romance, or crime. But the truth is plain: the average writer in any one of those genres is likely to have a far superior technique to the average writer of literary fiction. Why? Because the genre writer is required, by both publisher and readers, to make the book interesting, exciting, accessible, and rewarding. Literary writers apparently feel themselves under no such obligation, which is why I, for one, don't bother with them much.
So. Seen in the cold light of day, ignoring all the glamour and dazzle which accumulates around prize-winning books, what do we have in Kate Atkinson and Case Histories? What we have is a very promising talent and a somewhat lost opportunity. If someone (Al Zuckerman, for instance) were to sit Kate down and teach her her some of the basics of novel-writing (as Zuckerman did with Ken Follett), then she has certainly got the wit, the wisdom, and the general know-how to produce an absolute stunner. But she ain't done so yet.
(Should you wish to take your own course of instruction from Al Zuckerman, by the way, you can do so by reading his book Writing the Blockbuster Novel. Don't let your lip curl at the catchpenny title -- the book contains much that would be of value to any writer.)
All of that is just my opinion. So now let's take a look at what some other people, professional critics and therefore far superior judges to my modest self, have said about Case Histories.
Kate's publisher offers us two brief 'reviews', which most of us would call puffs, from other writers, and a link to a longer review in the New York Times. Here's a brief quote from one of the short 'reviews': 'Kate Atkinson's funny, furious fourth novel rumbustiously drives a path through the genre of detective fiction, demolishing its careful, forensic summations of human behaviour and replacing them with bloody, believable, vigorous tales of wrongdoing and loss, of personal eccentricity and recognisable fate, and most importantly of people who were very much alive before they were dead.'
You get the general drift of all that, don't you? What this worldly-wise, deeply experienced and generally infallible judge is saying is that detective fiction is all formula-driven crap, and what we have in Case Histories is Literature with a capital L -- or even LITERATURE -- which is clearly seen as a far superior genre altogether. Indeed one is left feeling that to use the word genre in the same sentence as the title of Kate's book is an insult in itself.
All of which you can safely forget, because it is the kind of statement that could only be made by someone with a profound ignorance of what the better writers of crime fiction have to offer.
On the publisher's web page devoted to Case Histories there is one other link to a review, and that is to Janet Maslin's write-up in the New York Times. Presumably this review is the most favourable, in a prestigious journal, that the publisher could find.
'There's nothing fancy,' says Janet, 'about the way Kate Atkinson's new novel unfolds. Ms Atkinson simply starts her story, grabs hold of the reader and doesn't let go.' Yeah, well, she didn't grab me, as I've said.
As with the short puff already quoted, Maslin's attitude is that this book appears to be a piece of crime fiction but is actually so much better than that. 'The ingredients for conventional sleuthing would seem to be in place,' she says, but fortunately the book heads off 'in a different direction.' Kate's style has 'a hint of Henry James', which is good, obviously, but it is 'occasionally too coarsened with pop-cultural references.' God, these literary people are such hideous snobs, aren't they? It's enough to bring up your breakfast.
Maslin's conclusion is that Case Histories 'winds up having more depth and vividness than ordinary thrillers.' No, it doesn't, darling, and that's the whole nature of my objection to it. It's really not as good as it would be if the author just put aside all fancy-pants notions, stopped believing what the critics say about her, and concentrated on doing a good professional job for the reader.
That said, I do have to express some understanding and sympathy with Kate Atkinson's position. Here she is in 1995, aged... well, pretty young, winning a prize for best novel of the year. You and I know, because we no longer believe in Father Christmas, that this award dropped into her lap as the result of pure randomness. But for those who are favoured by Fortuna it is all too easy to believe that it was the result of doing something right. So you go on doing it. Especially when the critics tell you how brilliant you are. It takes quite exceptional powers -- powers which it is unreasonable to expect the young to possess -- to separate yourself from all that adulation and to take a long hard look at your skills and what you are trying to do.
And it has to be remembered that Case Histories is only Kate Atkinson's fourth novel. She is still only a beginner. Thomas H. Uzzell, of revered memory, used to argue that you had to write a million words of fiction before you got the hang of it. And he was dead right. Kate Atkinson still has some way to go.
Kate first appeared on the scene in 1995, with her novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, published in the UK by Transworld. This won the Whitbread award for the best first novel of the year. The award meant that the book was then shortlisted for the title of overall Whitbread Book of the Year (compared with biography, et cetera), and it won that award too.
So far so good. A success story. Except that when I read Behind I couldn't see much in it. I now realise, of course, being definitely older and perhaps wiser, that Kate was simply the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of randomness, aka chance. It so happened that the goddess Fortuna smiled upon her. Kate's book was a perfectly competent piece of work, but it wasn't, in any absolute sense, a 'better' book than 150 others that were published that year. It just happened to be the one that the Whitbread judges liked best. With a different set of judges, some other book would have won, and Kate Atkinson would not have become a superstar; she would have been just another writer, not eligible for the full treatment of big publicity budget, author's tour, press interviews, the whole bag of tricks. In all probability she would have been dumped after two or three books which didn't sell very well.
In publishing, however, remarkable things happen to books that win prizes. A winner-take-all mechanism kicks in, and books which are not, in reality, any 'better' or more 'brilliant' than many others somehow acquire a reputation and a sparkle which colours everyone's view; technically, this is called survivorshp bias. (For more details of the winner-take-all mechanism and survivorship bias you will just have to read my latest extended essay, On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile; this was described at nauseating, self-satisfied length in my post of last Friday.)
So in 1995 our Kate became famous. She then went on to write a couple more books, Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (1999), and now she has published Case Histories, which I have just read. First I'll tell you what I thought of it, and then we'll have a look at a few other opinions.
As for me, well I found Case Histories to be hard going. For one thing you have to go 60 pages before you get anything that might reasonably be called a scene (in dramatic terms) in which two or more actors engage in a dialogue. And to my mind that ain't the best way to proceed. So I began to skip. Fast. Which is not, of course, the ideal way to read a novel. You should read every word, but I'm afraid I am very old-fashioned about these things and I expect the writer to give me some help. Reading a novel is suppose to be fun, at least in my estimation; it's supposed to be an enjoyable, interesting, satisfying experience; it's not supposed to be a whole lot of hard, tedious work.
Anyway, I did stick with the book, after a fashion, and after a couple of hundred pages or so I began to see a little more virtue in it. And by the end I could also see, very clearly, that if the material had been organised differently, Case Histories could have been an impressive novel indeed. But it would have been an impressive crime novel. And that, I suspect, is something that Kate Atkinson and her publisher would rather die than admit.
It has long been noted in these columns, and in places like Ansible, that those who choose to write and publish what they consider to be literary fiction would rather be burnt at the stake than admit that they have anything in common with sordid and inferior genres such as science fiction, romance, or crime. But the truth is plain: the average writer in any one of those genres is likely to have a far superior technique to the average writer of literary fiction. Why? Because the genre writer is required, by both publisher and readers, to make the book interesting, exciting, accessible, and rewarding. Literary writers apparently feel themselves under no such obligation, which is why I, for one, don't bother with them much.
So. Seen in the cold light of day, ignoring all the glamour and dazzle which accumulates around prize-winning books, what do we have in Kate Atkinson and Case Histories? What we have is a very promising talent and a somewhat lost opportunity. If someone (Al Zuckerman, for instance) were to sit Kate down and teach her her some of the basics of novel-writing (as Zuckerman did with Ken Follett), then she has certainly got the wit, the wisdom, and the general know-how to produce an absolute stunner. But she ain't done so yet.
(Should you wish to take your own course of instruction from Al Zuckerman, by the way, you can do so by reading his book Writing the Blockbuster Novel. Don't let your lip curl at the catchpenny title -- the book contains much that would be of value to any writer.)
All of that is just my opinion. So now let's take a look at what some other people, professional critics and therefore far superior judges to my modest self, have said about Case Histories.
Kate's publisher offers us two brief 'reviews', which most of us would call puffs, from other writers, and a link to a longer review in the New York Times. Here's a brief quote from one of the short 'reviews': 'Kate Atkinson's funny, furious fourth novel rumbustiously drives a path through the genre of detective fiction, demolishing its careful, forensic summations of human behaviour and replacing them with bloody, believable, vigorous tales of wrongdoing and loss, of personal eccentricity and recognisable fate, and most importantly of people who were very much alive before they were dead.'
You get the general drift of all that, don't you? What this worldly-wise, deeply experienced and generally infallible judge is saying is that detective fiction is all formula-driven crap, and what we have in Case Histories is Literature with a capital L -- or even LITERATURE -- which is clearly seen as a far superior genre altogether. Indeed one is left feeling that to use the word genre in the same sentence as the title of Kate's book is an insult in itself.
All of which you can safely forget, because it is the kind of statement that could only be made by someone with a profound ignorance of what the better writers of crime fiction have to offer.
On the publisher's web page devoted to Case Histories there is one other link to a review, and that is to Janet Maslin's write-up in the New York Times. Presumably this review is the most favourable, in a prestigious journal, that the publisher could find.
'There's nothing fancy,' says Janet, 'about the way Kate Atkinson's new novel unfolds. Ms Atkinson simply starts her story, grabs hold of the reader and doesn't let go.' Yeah, well, she didn't grab me, as I've said.
As with the short puff already quoted, Maslin's attitude is that this book appears to be a piece of crime fiction but is actually so much better than that. 'The ingredients for conventional sleuthing would seem to be in place,' she says, but fortunately the book heads off 'in a different direction.' Kate's style has 'a hint of Henry James', which is good, obviously, but it is 'occasionally too coarsened with pop-cultural references.' God, these literary people are such hideous snobs, aren't they? It's enough to bring up your breakfast.
Maslin's conclusion is that Case Histories 'winds up having more depth and vividness than ordinary thrillers.' No, it doesn't, darling, and that's the whole nature of my objection to it. It's really not as good as it would be if the author just put aside all fancy-pants notions, stopped believing what the critics say about her, and concentrated on doing a good professional job for the reader.
That said, I do have to express some understanding and sympathy with Kate Atkinson's position. Here she is in 1995, aged... well, pretty young, winning a prize for best novel of the year. You and I know, because we no longer believe in Father Christmas, that this award dropped into her lap as the result of pure randomness. But for those who are favoured by Fortuna it is all too easy to believe that it was the result of doing something right. So you go on doing it. Especially when the critics tell you how brilliant you are. It takes quite exceptional powers -- powers which it is unreasonable to expect the young to possess -- to separate yourself from all that adulation and to take a long hard look at your skills and what you are trying to do.
And it has to be remembered that Case Histories is only Kate Atkinson's fourth novel. She is still only a beginner. Thomas H. Uzzell, of revered memory, used to argue that you had to write a million words of fiction before you got the hang of it. And he was dead right. Kate Atkinson still has some way to go.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Interview with Neal Stephenson
The science fiction magazine Locus has an online presence which I look at once a month, because it offers a remarkably full set of links to all kinds of interesting articles about this and that as well as pure scfi. This month it provided a link to an interview with Neal Stepehenson, conducted by Mike Godwin.
As you would expect, if you know anything about Neal Stephenson, he has a great many insightful and rewarding things to say. And if you don't know anything about Neal Stephenson, then this is a good place to start.
Among other things, Neal introduces us (well, me) to the theologian Walter Wink, and his concept of domination systems (not as dirty as it sounds). He comments on US attitudes to scientists and technologists, and demonstrates that he understands the difference between alternate history and alternative history (I told you he was smart).
By the way, it looks like you should add Robert Hooke's Micrographia to your reading list, along with Urn Burial. You can find some of Micrographia here. I've been telling you that those seventeenth-century guys were worth reading, and maybe you'll take it from Neal if not from me.
As you would expect, if you know anything about Neal Stephenson, he has a great many insightful and rewarding things to say. And if you don't know anything about Neal Stephenson, then this is a good place to start.
Among other things, Neal introduces us (well, me) to the theologian Walter Wink, and his concept of domination systems (not as dirty as it sounds). He comments on US attitudes to scientists and technologists, and demonstrates that he understands the difference between alternate history and alternative history (I told you he was smart).
By the way, it looks like you should add Robert Hooke's Micrographia to your reading list, along with Urn Burial. You can find some of Micrographia here. I've been telling you that those seventeenth-century guys were worth reading, and maybe you'll take it from Neal if not from me.
Monday, February 14, 2005
What song the sirens sang
By the way, the latest Ansible (see post immediately below) begins with the following famous quotation: 'What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.' Who wrote that? Quick now, and no cheating.
The answer, of course, is that great seventeenth-century physician of Norwich, Dr Thomas Browne. The words are to be found in Chapter V of his famous essay Hydriotaphia, better known perhaps as Urn Burial. Ansible's use of this quotation, in a casual, throw-away manner, is itself sufficient to disprove the oft-heard allegation that science-fiction freaks are ignorant slobs, unfit to do more than empty your dustbin.
I was first introduced to Thomas Browne about forty-six years ago, by William Styron. He used Urn Burial as the source for the title of his novel Lie Down in Darkness. Browne says this:
Urn Burial is a meditation upon the meaning of life and death. Browne's prose is dense, and for modern readers it is often quite difficult to understand. It is also patchy (in my view) and uneven. But read certain passages aloud and you will hear prose of a quality which has seldom been equalled. Virginia Woolf said that 'Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.' So perhaps he's worth making a little effort.
Browne is also full of good sense. What better way could I find to construct this post than to offer some of his thoughts for your reflection:
'The religion of one seems madness unto another.'
And to some, any kind of religion is deeply suspicious.
'The greater part [of men] must be content to be as though they had not been: to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man.'
Think about that, o ye who yearn to be famous.
'To be ignorant of evils to come and forgetful of evils past is a merciful provision in nature.'
I recently met an old man in a gym (older than me, even). He told me that he had been sent by his doctor, but for sixteen hours a day he had to be linked to an oxygen tank to aid his breathing! 'It is lucky,' he said, 'that we don't know what the future holds for us.' Thus echoing Browne, who beat him to it by 360 years or so.
'But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly.'
This is said in reference to the pharaohs of Egypt trying to mummify themselves to last for ever, but it applies to much else. 'Feeding the wind, and folly' certainly rings a few bells with anyone who has had anything to do with publishing.
'Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.'
'Happy are they... who deal so with men in this world that they are not afraid to meet them in the next.'
And so on. But there is no substitute for reading the original. You will probably do better to look for an old edition on abebooks than for a modern one on Amazon, either in the UK or the US. And if you would like to get a taste of the thing online, before buying, you can find a complete text here. Plus a great deal more.
The answer, of course, is that great seventeenth-century physician of Norwich, Dr Thomas Browne. The words are to be found in Chapter V of his famous essay Hydriotaphia, better known perhaps as Urn Burial. Ansible's use of this quotation, in a casual, throw-away manner, is itself sufficient to disprove the oft-heard allegation that science-fiction freaks are ignorant slobs, unfit to do more than empty your dustbin.
I was first introduced to Thomas Browne about forty-six years ago, by William Styron. He used Urn Burial as the source for the title of his novel Lie Down in Darkness. Browne says this:
And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even pagans could doubt whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right declensions and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time that grows old itself bids us hope no long duration -- diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.Better remember that, folks: diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation. What that means is that you ain't gonna live for ever, so make the most of it while you can.
Urn Burial is a meditation upon the meaning of life and death. Browne's prose is dense, and for modern readers it is often quite difficult to understand. It is also patchy (in my view) and uneven. But read certain passages aloud and you will hear prose of a quality which has seldom been equalled. Virginia Woolf said that 'Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are of the salt of the Earth.' So perhaps he's worth making a little effort.
Browne is also full of good sense. What better way could I find to construct this post than to offer some of his thoughts for your reflection:
'The religion of one seems madness unto another.'
And to some, any kind of religion is deeply suspicious.
'The greater part [of men] must be content to be as though they had not been: to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man.'
Think about that, o ye who yearn to be famous.
'To be ignorant of evils to come and forgetful of evils past is a merciful provision in nature.'
I recently met an old man in a gym (older than me, even). He told me that he had been sent by his doctor, but for sixteen hours a day he had to be linked to an oxygen tank to aid his breathing! 'It is lucky,' he said, 'that we don't know what the future holds for us.' Thus echoing Browne, who beat him to it by 360 years or so.
'But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly.'
This is said in reference to the pharaohs of Egypt trying to mummify themselves to last for ever, but it applies to much else. 'Feeding the wind, and folly' certainly rings a few bells with anyone who has had anything to do with publishing.
'Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.'
'Happy are they... who deal so with men in this world that they are not afraid to meet them in the next.'
And so on. But there is no substitute for reading the original. You will probably do better to look for an old edition on abebooks than for a modern one on Amazon, either in the UK or the US. And if you would like to get a taste of the thing online, before buying, you can find a complete text here. Plus a great deal more.
Ansible to everyone
Dave Langford's latest Ansible newsletter quotes Popbitch as the source of the following report: 'Famous Sri Lanka resident Arthur C. Clarke has survived the terrible floods. He was found in the sea clinging on to a buoy...'
As I say, this report is at least third-hand so it may not be entirely accurate, but it sounds like good news for science-fiction fans.
Meanwhile the Ansible newsletter is excellent news for anyone who is remotely interested in science fiction or fantasy. It usually provides mentions of a number of books which might be worth reading, plus occasional humour; not a bad mixture. I have provided a link to Ansible above.
As for Popbitch, I haven't provided a link to that because when I went there the first thing that greeted me was an advert for thoroughly filthy DVDs. Also there were some very hurtful things said about Prince Charles on the message board, so naturally no reader of the GOB could possibly be interested. You can find it on Google if you absolutely insist. Oh all right then.
As I say, this report is at least third-hand so it may not be entirely accurate, but it sounds like good news for science-fiction fans.
Meanwhile the Ansible newsletter is excellent news for anyone who is remotely interested in science fiction or fantasy. It usually provides mentions of a number of books which might be worth reading, plus occasional humour; not a bad mixture. I have provided a link to Ansible above.
As for Popbitch, I haven't provided a link to that because when I went there the first thing that greeted me was an advert for thoroughly filthy DVDs. Also there were some very hurtful things said about Prince Charles on the message board, so naturally no reader of the GOB could possibly be interested. You can find it on Google if you absolutely insist. Oh all right then.
Friday, February 11, 2005
On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile
Here is an important announcement. Well, it’s important to me, anyway.
Over the last two or three months I have been working on an extended essay about the many problems involved in writing and publishing. Its title, as you can guess from the heading of this post, is On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile.
For better or for worse, the essay turns out to be far too long to be posted here – even if I split it up into various parts. It runs to 72 A4 pages: about 24,000 words. So instead of posting it here I have decided to make it available as a PDF file. It’s free, of course.
If and when you download this file, you will be able to print it out – which is certainly the most convenient way to read it. You may also copy the PDF and email it to a friend if you wish. In short, you are welcome to enable other people to read the essay if you would like to.
What’s the essay about? Well, it’s about the problem of randomness (chance) as it affects writers and publishers.
Some years ago I came to the conclusion that success for writers and publishers is governed by randomness to a far greater extent than is generally recognised. This conclusion has recently been echoed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, with his work on ‘black swans’ (random events) in the arts.
The effects of randomness in publishing create serious problems for all those who work in the book trade. In the latter part of my essay I therefore go on to suggest some practical strategies which can be employed by writers, agents, and publishers; these strategies naturally cannot guarantee success (I’m not that clever); but they may help players in the book-trade game to survive and perhaps even prosper in what is increasingly a turbulent environment.
If you’re already prepared to give the essay a try, you can find a download page here. If you want to know more, the introduction to the essay is reproduced below.
INTRODUCTION
Aims
This essay has two principal aims: first, to help writers, literary agents, and publishers to understand the full scale of the difficulties that face them; and second, to suggest strategies which will enable such participants in the book trade to survive and perhaps even prosper.
These aims may immediately be thought to be both presumptuous and unnecessary. After all, you are saying to yourself, people who work in publishing are all professionals; they know precisely what they’re doing, and they don’t need any help from smart-arse commentators.
That is true, up to a point. But there is, unfortunately, a considerable body of evidence to show that writers, in particular, have a grossly overoptimistic view of their own chances of achieving success (however defined); and every year brings a fresh crop of stories about publishers who have either paid far too much for a book which turned out to be a dud, or decided against publishing a book which some other firm accepted and then proceeded to turn into a smash hit. I immodestly suggest, therefore, that all riders on the publishing merry-go-round might do worse than spend a few minutes considering the thoughts which are presented here.
The essay should be particularly useful for writers, because they are the ones most likely to labour for years, motivated only by dreams rather than hard cash; and, when their dreams fail to materialise, they are the ones most likely to suffer psychological and physical damage, as a result of powerful emotions such as anger, bitterness, and frustration. It will do no harm at all for these people to have a clearer idea, at an early stage, of the nature of the problems they face.
By ‘writers’ I mean, for present purposes, novelists. Much of the essay will be written in terms of the problems facing novelists, but almost everything that I have to say will also apply to writers of non-fiction; and much of it will be relevant to playwrights and screenwriters.
The essay is written in the context of book publishing in the UK, but the position is not, I suggest, very different anywhere else in the world.
Publishing from a writer’s perspective
Without writers there are no books. Without books there are no publishing firms, no leisurely lunches on expenses, no specialist book printers and binders, no book-trade van drivers, no librarians – and not even any readers. The whole of the book trade begins, therefore, with writers; with their hopes, fears, ambitions, and funny little ways. For that reason alone we should take a close look at this bizarre species.
Nearly all writers yearn to be published; not only do they want to be published, but they burn to be successful. They want to be rich, famous, and worshipped by the critics; they look forward to an orderly queue of admirers forming outside their bedroom door.
Writers recognise, of course, that this happy state of affairs cannot come about overnight; but in the early days, when hope is intense in their bosoms, they can see no reason why it should not be achieved by 4 p.m. next Thursday.
From a statistical point of view alone, such hopes are fundamentally absurd, and the material in this essay will explain in some detail why it is that writers are unlikely to be successful in achieving their ambitions.
The essay is prompted by my dismay, which has intensified over several decades, at seeing so many intelligent, sensitive, and hard-working people waste so much of their time on the largely futile business of trying to write and sell novels. (I have written about a dozen myself, without, so far, igniting any huge fires.) It irks me that human beings are so slow to learn, and, having learnt, are so ineffective at passing on what they have learnt. This essay is therefore my attempt to remedy what I see as certain deficiencies in the educational process, at least as far as fiction is concerned. I shall eschew, as far as possible, offering advice; but the facts, when explained, may suggest to readers that some courses of action are far more sensible than others.
In the course of this exercise, I hope to minimise the frustration and despair, and to maximise the profit and enjoyment, not only of writers but of all those involved in the book trade.
I shall try, as far as possible, not to apportion blame or to make too many criticisms of individuals who are doing their best in difficult circumstances.
Between us, we shall, I hope, develop a sense of proportion, and, above all, a sense of humour; the latter is an essential attribute on the part of those who wish to contemplate the vagaries of the book business while remaining sane.
Some of the facts and ideas which are set out here have already been presented to readers in other media: either in my blog, the Grumpy Old Bookman, or in my book The Truth about Writing. (Note: full details of this and other major publications mentioned in the text can be found in the references section at the end.) There is, however, much new thinking on offer in this essay, and it has largely been inspired and stimulated by the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is the author of a book called Fooled by Randomness.
Dr Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb is one of those rare creatures, someone who has a successful track record in the business world and yet is comfortable, and respected, in academia.
In the world of high finance, Taleb has held a number of senior posts, including that of managing director and head trader at Union Bank of Switzerland, and worldwide chief derivatives trader at CS-First Boston; he is currently Founder and Chairman of Empirica LLC, a research laboratory and financial products trading house in New York.
Taleb’s educational background includes an MBA from Wharton and a PhD from Université Paris-Dauphine. He is a Fellow in Mathematics and Adjunct Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, and Visiting Professor of Risk Management at Université Paris-Dauphine.
Taleb first came to public attention as the author of Fooled by Randomness, the subtitle of which is ‘The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets’. When first published, this was selected by both Amazon.com and the Financial Times as one of the best business books of the year, and is published in 14 languages. It has, however, a relevance far beyond the world of business.
Taleb’s intellectual interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, finance, literature, and cognitive science. He specialises in the risks of unpredicted rare events (‘black swans’), and as an essayist he is principally concerned with the problems of uncertainty and knowledge.
For more information visit Dr Taleb’s web site.
The structure of the essay
Part 1 introduces the reader to the concept of black swans, as defined by Taleb.
Part 2 describes a hypothetical experiment with rats, which Taleb uses as a means of illustrating a number of erroneous ways of thinking and arguing. The chief error is perhaps that of falling prey to survivorship bias, which means that the observer sees only the survivors of any particular course of events, and fails to take adequate note of the characteristics of the many other participants.
In Part 3, we note that Taleb’s experiment with rats is in many ways analogous with the slush-pile procedure, as traditionally carried out in the offices of publishers and literary agents. We then proceed to review Taleb’s various forms of faulty thinking, as they apply in the context of writing and publishing; in particular, we try to learn how to think clearly about publishing issues, a skill which is in notably short supply.
The evidence assembled in Part 3 demonstrates beyond question that randomness plays a major part in publishing; specifically, we learn that, provided a manuscript reaches a certain basic professional standard, it is randomness which thereafter determines the ‘success’ of that book.
The fourth part of the essay is intended to provide practical assistance to those who are involved in looking for suitable books to publish (slush-pile selectors). Starting from the most basic of questions – Is publishing a sensible business for companies or individuals to be involved in? – we move on to consider both reactive and proactive procedures for managing the slush pile.
Part 5 outlines a similarly pragmatic approach that may be applied by those who are slush-pile contributors, i.e. writers.
(End of Introduction)
Still interested? To reach the download page, click here.
Over the last two or three months I have been working on an extended essay about the many problems involved in writing and publishing. Its title, as you can guess from the heading of this post, is On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile.
For better or for worse, the essay turns out to be far too long to be posted here – even if I split it up into various parts. It runs to 72 A4 pages: about 24,000 words. So instead of posting it here I have decided to make it available as a PDF file. It’s free, of course.
If and when you download this file, you will be able to print it out – which is certainly the most convenient way to read it. You may also copy the PDF and email it to a friend if you wish. In short, you are welcome to enable other people to read the essay if you would like to.
What’s the essay about? Well, it’s about the problem of randomness (chance) as it affects writers and publishers.
Some years ago I came to the conclusion that success for writers and publishers is governed by randomness to a far greater extent than is generally recognised. This conclusion has recently been echoed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, with his work on ‘black swans’ (random events) in the arts.
The effects of randomness in publishing create serious problems for all those who work in the book trade. In the latter part of my essay I therefore go on to suggest some practical strategies which can be employed by writers, agents, and publishers; these strategies naturally cannot guarantee success (I’m not that clever); but they may help players in the book-trade game to survive and perhaps even prosper in what is increasingly a turbulent environment.
If you’re already prepared to give the essay a try, you can find a download page here. If you want to know more, the introduction to the essay is reproduced below.
INTRODUCTION
Aims
This essay has two principal aims: first, to help writers, literary agents, and publishers to understand the full scale of the difficulties that face them; and second, to suggest strategies which will enable such participants in the book trade to survive and perhaps even prosper.
These aims may immediately be thought to be both presumptuous and unnecessary. After all, you are saying to yourself, people who work in publishing are all professionals; they know precisely what they’re doing, and they don’t need any help from smart-arse commentators.
That is true, up to a point. But there is, unfortunately, a considerable body of evidence to show that writers, in particular, have a grossly overoptimistic view of their own chances of achieving success (however defined); and every year brings a fresh crop of stories about publishers who have either paid far too much for a book which turned out to be a dud, or decided against publishing a book which some other firm accepted and then proceeded to turn into a smash hit. I immodestly suggest, therefore, that all riders on the publishing merry-go-round might do worse than spend a few minutes considering the thoughts which are presented here.
The essay should be particularly useful for writers, because they are the ones most likely to labour for years, motivated only by dreams rather than hard cash; and, when their dreams fail to materialise, they are the ones most likely to suffer psychological and physical damage, as a result of powerful emotions such as anger, bitterness, and frustration. It will do no harm at all for these people to have a clearer idea, at an early stage, of the nature of the problems they face.
By ‘writers’ I mean, for present purposes, novelists. Much of the essay will be written in terms of the problems facing novelists, but almost everything that I have to say will also apply to writers of non-fiction; and much of it will be relevant to playwrights and screenwriters.
The essay is written in the context of book publishing in the UK, but the position is not, I suggest, very different anywhere else in the world.
Publishing from a writer’s perspective
Without writers there are no books. Without books there are no publishing firms, no leisurely lunches on expenses, no specialist book printers and binders, no book-trade van drivers, no librarians – and not even any readers. The whole of the book trade begins, therefore, with writers; with their hopes, fears, ambitions, and funny little ways. For that reason alone we should take a close look at this bizarre species.
Nearly all writers yearn to be published; not only do they want to be published, but they burn to be successful. They want to be rich, famous, and worshipped by the critics; they look forward to an orderly queue of admirers forming outside their bedroom door.
Writers recognise, of course, that this happy state of affairs cannot come about overnight; but in the early days, when hope is intense in their bosoms, they can see no reason why it should not be achieved by 4 p.m. next Thursday.
From a statistical point of view alone, such hopes are fundamentally absurd, and the material in this essay will explain in some detail why it is that writers are unlikely to be successful in achieving their ambitions.
The essay is prompted by my dismay, which has intensified over several decades, at seeing so many intelligent, sensitive, and hard-working people waste so much of their time on the largely futile business of trying to write and sell novels. (I have written about a dozen myself, without, so far, igniting any huge fires.) It irks me that human beings are so slow to learn, and, having learnt, are so ineffective at passing on what they have learnt. This essay is therefore my attempt to remedy what I see as certain deficiencies in the educational process, at least as far as fiction is concerned. I shall eschew, as far as possible, offering advice; but the facts, when explained, may suggest to readers that some courses of action are far more sensible than others.
In the course of this exercise, I hope to minimise the frustration and despair, and to maximise the profit and enjoyment, not only of writers but of all those involved in the book trade.
I shall try, as far as possible, not to apportion blame or to make too many criticisms of individuals who are doing their best in difficult circumstances.
Between us, we shall, I hope, develop a sense of proportion, and, above all, a sense of humour; the latter is an essential attribute on the part of those who wish to contemplate the vagaries of the book business while remaining sane.
Some of the facts and ideas which are set out here have already been presented to readers in other media: either in my blog, the Grumpy Old Bookman, or in my book The Truth about Writing. (Note: full details of this and other major publications mentioned in the text can be found in the references section at the end.) There is, however, much new thinking on offer in this essay, and it has largely been inspired and stimulated by the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is the author of a book called Fooled by Randomness.
Dr Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb is one of those rare creatures, someone who has a successful track record in the business world and yet is comfortable, and respected, in academia.
In the world of high finance, Taleb has held a number of senior posts, including that of managing director and head trader at Union Bank of Switzerland, and worldwide chief derivatives trader at CS-First Boston; he is currently Founder and Chairman of Empirica LLC, a research laboratory and financial products trading house in New York.
Taleb’s educational background includes an MBA from Wharton and a PhD from Université Paris-Dauphine. He is a Fellow in Mathematics and Adjunct Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, and Visiting Professor of Risk Management at Université Paris-Dauphine.
Taleb first came to public attention as the author of Fooled by Randomness, the subtitle of which is ‘The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and the Markets’. When first published, this was selected by both Amazon.com and the Financial Times as one of the best business books of the year, and is published in 14 languages. It has, however, a relevance far beyond the world of business.
Taleb’s intellectual interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, mathematics, finance, literature, and cognitive science. He specialises in the risks of unpredicted rare events (‘black swans’), and as an essayist he is principally concerned with the problems of uncertainty and knowledge.
For more information visit Dr Taleb’s web site.
The structure of the essay
Part 1 introduces the reader to the concept of black swans, as defined by Taleb.
Part 2 describes a hypothetical experiment with rats, which Taleb uses as a means of illustrating a number of erroneous ways of thinking and arguing. The chief error is perhaps that of falling prey to survivorship bias, which means that the observer sees only the survivors of any particular course of events, and fails to take adequate note of the characteristics of the many other participants.
In Part 3, we note that Taleb’s experiment with rats is in many ways analogous with the slush-pile procedure, as traditionally carried out in the offices of publishers and literary agents. We then proceed to review Taleb’s various forms of faulty thinking, as they apply in the context of writing and publishing; in particular, we try to learn how to think clearly about publishing issues, a skill which is in notably short supply.
The evidence assembled in Part 3 demonstrates beyond question that randomness plays a major part in publishing; specifically, we learn that, provided a manuscript reaches a certain basic professional standard, it is randomness which thereafter determines the ‘success’ of that book.
The fourth part of the essay is intended to provide practical assistance to those who are involved in looking for suitable books to publish (slush-pile selectors). Starting from the most basic of questions – Is publishing a sensible business for companies or individuals to be involved in? – we move on to consider both reactive and proactive procedures for managing the slush pile.
Part 5 outlines a similarly pragmatic approach that may be applied by those who are slush-pile contributors, i.e. writers.
(End of Introduction)
Still interested? To reach the download page, click here.
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